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With statewide polling showing California voters essentially deadlocked on a proposition to allow cities to expand rent control to newer buildings, San Francisco lawmakers continue to prepare to spring into action if the ballot measure passes.

On Monday, the Board of Supervisors Land Use and Transportation Committee, in a 2-1 vote, passed legislation that would expand rent control to about 100,000 San Francisco renters who don't currently have rental price protections.

The committee sent the legislation to the full Board of Supervisors with a positive recommendation.

"This ordinance will deliver stable housing and freedom from arbitrary price increases and price gouging to roughly 100,000 San Francisco renters who are denied their rights by this outdated state law," said Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who introduced the legislation. Both the local and state rent control initiatives are the latest in a seemingly unending battle between tenants rights groups and real estate interests over whether to expand rent protections.

Next month, for the third time in six years, California voters will be asked whether to repeal the statewide Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which says cities cannot impose rent control on housing built after Feb. 1, 1995, or on single-family homes or separately owned multifamily units like condos.

The current statewide measure, Prop. 33, would repeal Costa-Hawkins and allow local governments to set their own rent control laws, and the state wouldn't be allowed to interfere with that. A recent poll by the University of Southern California, California State University Long Beach and Cal Poly Pomona found support for Prop. 33 to be up to 37%, with 33% of respondents against it, while 30% were undecided.

While the San Francisco law would not apply to new construction — it would cover multifamily properties that were built between June 13, 1979, and Nov. 5, 2024 — developers and housing advocates have said that it would have a chilling effect on investors and builders who have, by and large, stayed away from San Francisco since the pandemic. That has led to a huge drop in housing production, making it more and more likely that the city could fail to meet its state-mandated goal of producing 82,000 housing units by 2031.

Charley Goss, of the San Francisco Apartment Association, said Peskin's ordinance is being "pushed through in the middle of campaign season without any study or analysis as to how the development of new housing will be impacted."

"This ordinance, without properly studying the impact on development of new housing, is bad anti-housing policy that will effectively stop new housing from being created."

"It will make it all but impossible for San Francisco to meet its housing goals and mandates," he said.

Peskin said the legislation intentionally left out new construction, and accused the large landlord and real estate industry of "creating a bogeyman that absolutely does not exist."

"This legislation proposed something that is very simple and very elegant," he said. "To call this anti-housing policy is absolute hogwash."

Supervisor Dean Preston, a former tenants rights attorney who is co-sponsoring the legislation, said the current rules for which buildings are protected by rent control and which are not is "completely arbitrary law."

"We can have two buildings next to each other in San Francisco: one building that has a set of protections and another building that doesn't," he said. "There is no policy justification whatsoever."

Supervisor Myrna Melgar, who heads up the committee, voted against moving the legislation forward. She said while she agreed with its goals, she had legal questions about how it would impact buildings with deed-restricted affordable units.

Housing Action Coalition Executive Director Corey Smith speculated that the legislation would inevitably be followed by an effort to apply rent control to all new housing.

"Given that this board has previously introduced legislation that would apply rent control to all new housing the general belief is that would be the next step," he said. "It would overall have a cooling impact on the ability to get projects financed and built here in San Francisco."

But several tenants took exception to the idea that potentially discouraging developers from building is more important that protecting existing households from unexpected and excessive rent hikes. Longtime Haight-Ashbury activist Calvin Welch said "rent control is the only control the city and county has on market rate housing."

"We need controls on market rate development and market rate housing or we will no longer have a San Francisco made up of San Franciscans," he said.